Honors now reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of our whole student body.”
Traditionally, honors programs have been disproportionately composed of white students with socioeconomic privilege due to narrow admission standards and biased notions of who is “qualified” and “ready” for honors.
Bridgewater State University has been taking steps to change this reality. Seeking to center racial equity and social justice in honors, the program has made several changes in recent years.
Today, 30 percent of those in the program are racially minoritized students. That number is an increase from 9 percent just seven years ago.
“Honors now reflects the racial and ethnic diversity of our whole student body,” said Dr. Jenny Shanahan, assistant provost and head of the university’s Center for Transformative Learning, of which the Honors Program is a part. “Just as importantly, honors students across demographics and identities are demonstrating academic success and reporting a sense of belonging in the program.”
The benefits associated with honors programs are myriad. At BSU, retention rates for honors students between their first and second year is above 90 percent. That’s significantly higher than rates for their peers, including those with matched GPAs. Honors students have transformative experiences with faculty mentors. Participation also builds a community of scholars on campus and beyond and enhances a sense of belonging.
Today, 1,330 BSU students are involved in honors. Centering equity in honors has increased participation and ensured that students from diverse backgrounds participate and succeed in honors. A more robust and diverse program has added many intangibles, all positive. This reinforces the program’s cri de coeur: “Expansive academic excellence.”
To learn more about this success, we sat down with Dr. Shanahan with some questions.
Q: Can you describe the philosophical change behind the increased diversity in honors?
A: All of us involved in the Honors Program -- the faculty director and faculty fellows, honors staff, and the faculty and librarians on the Honors Advisory Board are dedicated to centering racial equity and social justice in honors at BSU. Putting equity at the center requires us to examine all our practices because they are steeped in a higher education history of whiteness and a longstanding association of honors with privilege. We’ve had minoritized honors students tell us how reluctant they were to apply for the program. They’d gotten the message many times in their lives that honors programs were for other types of students. Those experiences indicate some of the enormous costs to minoritized students of years of institutional and interpersonal racism.
Q: Did student feedback impact this change?
A: Yes. We listened to the voices and experiences of minoritized students about what they hope for in their honors experience and where the barriers are, and we seek to mitigate or even tear them down. We began asking, ‘Why do we do that, and what purpose is it serving? Gatekeeping? Who are the gates keeping out?’ We are continually learning about and examining how race and racism intersect in our program values, policies and practices, and we’re engaged in an ongoing process of making equity-focused changes in response to what we learn.
Q: Can you talk about the traditional connection between privilege and honors?
A: Many honors programs have been reifying privilege and rewarding something that students have achieved in the past, not necessarily looking at students’ potential. As one scholar has put it: Honors has been the academic equivalent of flying first class. And that’s true! Honors programs have been creating elite, special opportunities for students who already have a lot of privilege and setting them apart in a way that’s not equitable. In higher education, we’ve valued such limited notions of the assets our students bring, but our students actually bring tremendous community and cultural wealth that has often been overlooked.
Q: Can you talk about some of these barriers and the changes you’ve made?
A: Deciding who ‘belongs’ in honors has traditionally hinged on narrow considerations of academic merit, such as standardized test scores and competitive achievements in high school. Many students accepted to honors have benefited from a ‘shadow education’ of test preparation, tutoring and other enhancements most often available to those students with higher-income, college-educated parents. Honors programs and colleges, therefore, have been composed mainly of white, socioeconomically privileged, and continuing-generation students. Higher education is becoming more diverse; 60 percent of college students in the U.S. are from racially minoritized groups. But honors opportunities are not; only 30 percent of honors students nationwide are racially minoritized. By using the community cultural wealth model, which emerged from Critical Race Theory and broadens understanding of diverse students’ academic and intellectual assets, we have made major changes to our practices.
Q: And changes have been made regarding entrance requirements, correct?
A: Yes, we’ve made changes to honors admission practices, but more importantly, to our activities and norms before and beyond admissions -- from the ways we conduct outreach to prospective students, to the courses we offer in the honors curriculum, to the diverse co-curricular opportunities and events available to students, and more. Many institutions’ attempts to address inequity have been overly focused on only changing admission standards, without disrupting or addressing the deep, systemic inequities baked into honors and without positively affecting minoritized students’ experiences in honors programs. In terms of honors admissions at BSU, we dropped the SAT requirement about six years ago. The SAT is significantly correlated with family income and not a good predictor of success in college. So, why are so many honors programs and colleges using it? It’s pretty standard for schools to use SAT or ACT scores and other things, like the number of AP (advanced placement) courses taken and deep immersion in extra-curricular activities that are time intensive. There are many students who don’t have the time or resources to pursue those but have exceptional community and cultural wealth in other areas, like multilingualism and employment and caregiving to support their families. Also, some of our minoritized students asked why they had to write a separate essay (in addition to their essay for the common application), and why there were so many hoops if we really want them to join honors. Now, if a student has a 3.4 high school GPA or higher they qualify for honors at BSU. High school GPA is a great predictor of success in college. Students with lower GPAs who want to participate in honors can submit an exemplary piece of academic work for consideration. Since we’ve made these changes and many others, retention and graduation rates and honors participation are all up.
Q: What does ‘expansive excellence’ mean?
A: That’s a term from the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education’s Equity Agenda that we’ve embraced in honors at BSU. The concept of expansive academic excellence breaks down the hierarchy and ownership of ‘excellence’ and promotes the diversity of ways that excellence can be defined. So many traditional measures of student achievement use a very narrow definition of ‘academic excellence.’ We’re missing so many of the assets, skills and forms of knowledge that diverse students bring. There’s a diversity of ways that excellence can be demonstrated. We are recognizing students’ assets and working to nurture and create opportunities to showcase them.
Q: There are some who may wonder if these changes result in lowering standards of honors programs.
A: One thing that all the honors leaders at BSU really feel strongly about is that centering racial equity does not mean lowering standards. As a group we are committed to correcting the biased idea that diversifying honors leads to lower standards and to explaining how a broader, asset-based understanding of students’ expansive excellence actually upholds equitable academic standards. The reasons for disproportionate numbers of white students in honors is that standards of the past have been biased, narrow and upholding socioeconomic privilege. We’re changing all of that.